Dr Rosamund Lily West is a lecturer and architectural historian. She currently lectures at West Dean and University of the Arts London as well as leading architectural walking tours of Woolwich and Ca...

  A graduate of Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, Walter Lewis has served on the editorial board of FreshWater and is the production editor The Northern Mariner. In 1990 he took up scuba diving as part of the research for The River Palace, co-authored with Rick Neilson of Kingston and published by Dundurn in 2008.  His articles have appeared in places as varied as The Northern Mariner, FreshWater, Inland Seas,Ontario History, Beaver, Horizon Canada and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. His website, MaritimeHistoryOfTheGreatLakes.ca is recognized as a key resource for those doing research in the history of the Great Lakes.  He is currently a member of the executive council of the Canadian Nautical Research Society and chairs the Programs, Projects & Publications committee of the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History. Among others, his current research interests include iron shipbuilding, ship repair facilities and classification societies on the Great Lakes. This post was originally posted (in a shorter form) at Stories Maritime History of the Great Lakes. Thank you very much to Walter for allowing us to post and updated version as the first entry for our ‘Academic Processes and Digital Humanities‘ series. The most important shipping business journals published in the Great Lakes region prior to the Great Depression were the Marine Record (1878 – August 1902) and the Marine Review (March 1890-October 1935). When they merged in 1902, the result was published under the somewhat awkward banner “Marine Review and Marine Record,” while keeping the volume and issue numbering of the Review. In January 1904, “Marine Record” was dropped from the title, with the Record‘s remaining legacy being the claim on the cover that the journal was “established 1878.” Five years later, in April 1909, the new owners, Penton Publishing, switched from a weekly to a monthly format, which they retained until the journal was sold and merged with Marine Engineering and Shipping Age into Marine Engineering and Shipping Review, still published, but now known as MarineLog. While Marine Engineering dates from 1897, MarineLog also chooses to celebrate its origins from the first publication of the Marine Record in 1878. Now if we could only locate some issues of the Record from before 1883. Some years ago the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University organized the microfilming of many of the early issues of both the Marine Record and the Marine Review up to end of 1902. In 2010, we added just short of 17,000 pages from that microfilm to the Maritime History of the Great Lakes website covering the years 1883-1902. Thanks to issues shared by the Dossin Museum in Detroit, along with Ron Beaupre and Greg Rudnick, I have been able to both extend the coverage of the Marine Review to its end in 1935, but also to replace all but 2500 pages of the microfilm with images from the originals. The result is just over 55,000 pages of marine journalism published in Cleveland, Ohio. The journals had deep roots in Great Lakes shipping although from World War I, there was an increasing emphasis on global developments. One question I have been asked is “why go to the time and effort to re-shoot the issues from the originals?” A couple of examples may explain why. Almost all microfilm is photographed in black and white, with an emphasis on high contrast exposures that improves the ability to read the text on standard microfilm readers. The company that digitized the BGSU microfilm emphasized this contrast in the files they produced for us. For pages from the era of woodcut engravings this is less of an concern, although the additional generation of negative/positive print before digitization can still introduce focus issues. The challenge in many films comes from shadows in gutters in instances when the paper wasn’t disbound before filming (true here). Content in those columns may come up very dark, and after digitization, black on black. In part this is because many digitization projects, especially ones done ten or more years ago, were struggling to reduce file size and assumed that bitonal (aka each pixel in the image is either black or white) images would be acceptable. In some instances they are. But with the increasing use of photographs in the 1890s, the degree of greyness at which a given point on the page was converted to either black or white, makes for some very unhappy images. The Marine Review prided itself on its illustrations. Reshooting these, not just in greyscale, but in colour restored a significant amount of detail. This was especially true, when some earlier owner of the issue marked it up with a blue or other coloured pencil. Marine Review (Cleveland, OH), 8 Mar 1900, p. 9   from microfilm from the original The conversion to bitonal files also has a significant impact on the quality of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of the files. This is a computer process that converts the images of the text to text that can be searched in our indexes. When, for example, letters have parts that print more faintly, or where there is bleed-through from the ink on the other side of the page, the results are far from satisfactory. Best paragraph from the Microfilm – (midpoint, left column) from reshoot of original A ILUBBY OYIB DIIY TOBTUGAB. Iuststpruentthereisalittle flurryin Wuhingtoubetween the navy department and the Marine Hospital service. navy ‘departlnent has recently yent 050.000 establishing a coding nation at Dry Tor- tuga: an In equt wha considers. u the island. the most im- rortan ‘ 1ss::erntheChesa eand Central America. A ew bp g was en rised to receive a notifiatiqn from the ta-usury department to stop war at Dr! TOTIIIEII 5! tP”‘ 1. 55 Surgeon General W needed the place to are for yellow lever and bubonic plague patients. The ma thinks that the-e are sevwal other adjacent s a avail: . ‘lfllfvgaa and will de- elinetosurrenderDry ortugasnnlesslpecl yofildtdmdoiohr lhepréktthirnlell ‘ . A FLURRY OVER DRY TORTUGAS. Just at present there is a little flurry in Washington between the navy department and the Marine Hospital service. The navy department_has recently […]

    What immediate challenges did the governments concerned face for their dockyards and shipyards? What long-term impacts resonate for them today? Signifying personal and international interest and legacy: USS Salem, US 6th Fleet flagship being lifted by AFD 35 in Grand Harbour Malta, 1956, just before the Suez crisis. Decommissioned, now at US Naval and Shipbuilding Museum, Quincy, Massachusetts, https://www.uss-salem.org/. Photo Roger Bendall, 1956. Writing a decade after the Suez crisis, one contemporary politician dismissed the affair as merely ‘the dying convulsion of the British Empire.’ This view is still widely held today, but how authentic is that interpretation in hindsight? How did the Suez crisis redefine Britain’s international identity and economic profile and its relationship with former colonies and ongoing allies? And how did it influence attitudes among Britain’s allies, including France and Israel, who had taken part, and the United States who had forced an early end to the action? Critically, how did the Suez aftermath and its often bitter recriminations shape future British naval policy on home and overseas dockyards and shipyards and their communities? Conference themes will include: Overview of how the Suez crisis shaped subsequent British and Allied naval strategy and deployment in the Cold War Political, local, social and economic effects of Suez on dockyards and shipyards globally Global strategic threats and opportunities arising from Suez Suez accelerated the global power shift from Britain to the United States – evidence? If your proposal is accepted, you will present in-person or online. We shall refund UK/European travel fares to the conference (other overseas: travel from UK airport to Greenwich), your fee, lunch and contribute to accommodation, publish your paper and give you a journal volume. Your talk will be c.30 minutes, the printed paper 6–10k words, due 31 June 2026. Send your title, a 300-word synopsis and a 100-word biography by 15 December 2025 or earlier to Roger Bendall roger@rogerbendall.com and Dr Ann Coats avcoatsndschair@gmail.com N.B. The proposal should present original research. https://navaldockyards.org/conferences/ https://navaldockyards.org/ Facebook: NavalDockyardsSociety   Nutting, Anthony. No End of a Lesson. Constable, 1967. p. 108. A noted Arabist, Nutting resigned as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in protest at the invasion of Egypt.  

  A graduate of Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, Walter Lewis has served on the editorial board of FreshWater and is the production editor The Northern Mariner. In 1990 he took up scuba diving as part of the research for The River Palace, co-authored with Rick Neilson of Kingston and published by Dundurn in 2008.  His articles have appeared in places as varied as The Northern Mariner, FreshWater, Inland Seas,Ontario History, Beaver, Horizon Canada and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. His website, MaritimeHistoryOfTheGreatLakes.ca is recognized as a key resource for those doing research in the history of the Great Lakes.  He is currently a member of the executive council of the Canadian Nautical Research Society and chairs the Programs, Projects & Publications committee of the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History. Among others, his current research interests include iron shipbuilding, ship repair facilities and classification societies on the Great Lakes. This post was originally posted (in a shorter form) at Stories Maritime History of the Great Lakes. Thank you very much to Walter for allowing us to post and updated version as the first entry for our ‘Academic Processes and Digital Humanities‘ series. The most important shipping business journals published in the Great Lakes region prior to the Great Depression were the Marine Record (1878 – August 1902) and the Marine Review (March 1890-October 1935). When they merged in 1902, the result was published under the somewhat awkward banner “Marine Review and Marine Record,” while keeping the volume and issue numbering of the Review. In January 1904, “Marine Record” was dropped from the title, with the Record‘s remaining legacy being the claim on the cover that the journal was “established 1878.” Five years later, in April 1909, the new owners, Penton Publishing, switched from a weekly to a monthly format, which they retained until the journal was sold and merged with Marine Engineering and Shipping Age into Marine Engineering and Shipping Review, still published, but now known as MarineLog. While Marine Engineering dates from 1897, MarineLog also chooses to celebrate its origins from the first publication of the Marine Record in 1878. Now if we could only locate some issues of the Record from before 1883. Some years ago the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University organized the microfilming of many of the early issues of both the Marine Record and the Marine Review up to end of 1902. In 2010, we added just short of 17,000 pages from that microfilm to the Maritime History of the Great Lakes website covering the years 1883-1902. Thanks to issues shared by the Dossin Museum in Detroit, along with Ron Beaupre and Greg Rudnick, I have been able to both extend the coverage of the Marine Review to its end in 1935, but also to replace all but 2500 pages of the microfilm with images from the originals. The result is just over 55,000 pages of marine journalism published in Cleveland, Ohio. The journals had deep roots in Great Lakes shipping although from World War I, there was an increasing emphasis on global developments. One question I have been asked is “why go to the time and effort to re-shoot the issues from the originals?” A couple of examples may explain why. Almost all microfilm is photographed in black and white, with an emphasis on high contrast exposures that improves the ability to read the text on standard microfilm readers. The company that digitized the BGSU microfilm emphasized this contrast in the files they produced for us. For pages from the era of woodcut engravings this is less of an concern, although the additional generation of negative/positive print before digitization can still introduce focus issues. The challenge in many films comes from shadows in gutters in instances when the paper wasn’t disbound before filming (true here). Content in those columns may come up very dark, and after digitization, black on black. In part this is because many digitization projects, especially ones done ten or more years ago, were struggling to reduce file size and assumed that bitonal (aka each pixel in the image is either black or white) images would be acceptable. In some instances they are. But with the increasing use of photographs in the 1890s, the degree of greyness at which a given point on the page was converted to either black or white, makes for some very unhappy images. The Marine Review prided itself on its illustrations. Reshooting these, not just in greyscale, but in colour restored a significant amount of detail. This was especially true, when some earlier owner of the issue marked it up with a blue or other coloured pencil. Marine Review (Cleveland, OH), 8 Mar 1900, p. 9   from microfilm from the original The conversion to bitonal files also has a significant impact on the quality of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of the files. This is a computer process that converts the images of the text to text that can be searched in our indexes. When, for example, letters have parts that print more faintly, or where there is bleed-through from the ink on the other side of the page, the results are far from satisfactory. Best paragraph from the Microfilm – (midpoint, left column) from reshoot of original A ILUBBY OYIB DIIY TOBTUGAB. Iuststpruentthereisalittle flurryin Wuhingtoubetween the navy department and the Marine Hospital service. navy ‘departlnent has recently yent 050.000 establishing a coding nation at Dry Tor- tuga: an In equt wha considers. u the island. the most im- rortan ‘ 1ss::erntheChesa eand Central America. A ew bp g was en rised to receive a notifiatiqn from the ta-usury department to stop war at Dr! TOTIIIEII 5! tP”‘ 1. 55 Surgeon General W needed the place to are for yellow lever and bubonic plague patients. The ma thinks that the-e are sevwal other adjacent s a avail: . ‘lfllfvgaa and will de- elinetosurrenderDry ortugasnnlesslpecl yofildtdmdoiohr lhepréktthirnlell ‘ . A FLURRY OVER DRY TORTUGAS. Just at present there is a little flurry in Washington between the navy department and the Marine Hospital service. The navy department_has recently […]

Please give a warm welcome to Noor Hashmi, who is joining site staff as our Manchester Correspondent.  Noor Hashmi is currently pursuing an MA in Early Modern History at The University of Sheffield, where her research focuses on Caribbean slavery during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in Barbados and Jamaica. She previously completed a BA (Hons) in History at the University of Sheffield, graduating in July 2024. Following her undergraduate studies, Noor was awarded a Sheffield Postgraduate Scholarship. Her BA dissertation, titled ‘A Study of Medicine and Diseases in the Middle Passage,’ offered a comparative and chronological social and cultural analysis of how British surgeons and enslaved people treated diseases in West Africa, aboard slave ships, and in the Caribbean, as well as the motivations underpinning these practices. During her postgraduate studies, Noor’s research has expanded to examine Manchester’s historical connections to slavery. She was awarded the Dorothy Phillips Prize for Historical Research for the best funding proposal to support archival work for her MA dissertation. She also held the role of MA Social Secretary within the Department of History and Archaeology’s Postgraduate Forum, where she was responsible for organising and overseeing key events such as the PGR Colloquium, while also acting as a representative for MA students, voicing their concerns and contributing to departmental discussions. For any enquiries and projects, please contact her via email (noor.hashmi1@hotmail.com). Noor can also be found on Bluesky and Instagram.

2 October 2025 Andrew Livsey, King’s College London Sea Power Thought in the Cold War 16 October 2025 Ben Redding, University of East Anglia 1650s and 60s, Officer Radicalism in the English navy 30 October 2025 Asif Shakoor, Independent Scholar & Georgie Wemyss, University of East London ‘Unearthing Invisible Seafaring Histories of Empire’: Title to be Confirmed 13 November 2025 Alex Clarke, Independent Naval Historian & Founding Member of ShipShape Procurement for Peace 27 November 2025 Synnøve Marie Kvam, Project S/S Wanja & M/V Mim S/S Wanja and M/V Mim: the Ships that Changed Strategies in the North Atlantic early in WWII The Proctor Memorial Lecture: to be held at Lloyds Register 11 December 2025 Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, University of Iceland “We won!” The Cod Wars and the confessions of a historian who became head of state Registration for the Proctor Lecture on the 11th of December 2025 is to be done via the BCMH website Lectures & Events : British Commission for Maritime History The King’s Maritime History Seminars for 2025-26 may be attended in person or online. As always, attendance is free and open to all. To take part, you must register by visiting the KCL School of Security Studies Events page, here: www.kcl.ac.uk/security-studies/events.   Online attendees will receive instructions shortly before the event, by email, about how to join. Otherwise, we will meet in person, as usual, in the Dockrill Room, KIN 628, at King’s College London. Papers will begin at 17:15 GMT. The King’s Maritime History Seminar is hosted by the ‘Laughton Naval Unit’ and the ‘Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War’ in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. It is organised by the British Commission for Maritime History (www.maritimehistory.org.uk) in association with the Society for Nautical Research (https://snr.org.uk/). For further information contact Dr Alan James, War Studies, KCL, WC2R 2LS (alan.2.james@kcl.ac.uk).

Faith Currie is the Lead Museum Educator at the National Museum of the Great Lakes where she’ll be one of several knowledgeable and engaging guides of SS Edmund Fitzgerald specialty tours honoring and remembering the 50th Anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, she is a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Inland Seas, she is a certified nature journaling educator through the Wild Wonder Foundation, and an artist with public art in the city of Toledo. Currie is also the host of the Sunday night radio program The Great Lakes St. Lawrence Story System on WAKT community radio in Toledo. “Compared with the usual fate of humans, we who are engaged in preservation work, daily in contact with what we most like and admire, are fortunate indeed.” —Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage I am “fortunate indeed” that my work days revolve around things that are fundamental to me—the Great Lakes and the myriad bodies of water, fields, forests, flora and fauna around and between them. And, that I have the native Rust Belter’s nostalgic pride in industry, and intrinsic appreciation for the utilitarian. I have been on the historic lake freighter I work on around 200 times and I have never not been impressed the moment I stepped on deck. In his 1957 classic “Interpreting Our Heritage,” Freeman Tilden endeavored to define interpretation, thus: For dictionary purposes to fill a hiatus that urgently needs to be remedied, I am prepared to define the function called interpretation, by the National Park Service, by state and municipal parks, by museums and similar cultural institutions as follows: An educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information. I conduct guided tours for groups of all ages on the SS Col. James M. Schoonmaker. While those tours all convey much of the same information, I adapt each one to meet the group in front of me. If they are senior citizens who’ve grown up in Toledo, I’m prepared to talk about the S.S. Willis B. Boyer and answer variations on the question, “Why would somebody change the boat’s name?” If they’re farmers from rural Ohio, I know I’ll be reserving time for extra discussion in the galley and a visit to the engine room’s tool displays. One woman thanked me at the end of a tour, saying, “My son is in the Navy and I want to thank you for this, because now I know how important the Great Lakes are to our country. I have an understanding I didn’t have before.” School kids from Downriver Detroit might get an extra story about the J.W. Westcott Company which operates from the foot of 24th St. in Detroit. No two tours are identical. Kids from kindergarten through high school, and their grown-ups, get the best version for them. When I take kids on the boat, I have two overriding interpretive goals. One is to make space for their questions and reactions to what they are experiencing. The other is to help them discover the relationships between what they’re learning and their own lives. Some things like the two-bed four-person Oilers and Wipers cabin are easy. While they look at the cabin, I tell them what Oilers and Wipers did. I talk about shift-work. I tell them about the working environment on a coal-fired steamship. Then I tell them about hot bunking. They are generally and delightfully appalled. I ask, “Do you think you would like to trade shifts and share a cabin like this?” The answer is always a resounding, “No.” My favorite place to board is midship into the hold. When kids step through the door into the vast center hold they are awed. Not only is “awed” a good state of mind to start them off with, it makes for a breathtaking experience when they climb the narrow ships ladder and emerge on the deck facing the Maumee. As for relating personally from the hold to the deck, most of them have seen a freight train passing; oftentimes with open coal cars. I ask them how many coal cars worth of coal they think fit in the hold. When we get up to the deck, they can see the river, the city skyline, the double-leaf bascule bridges they’re standing between, and railroad tracks. We walk down the deck and enter the galley through the crew mess. The galley is something they recognize, so the stories tend toward the roles of the steward, cook, and porter. Their eyes are as big as the saucers behind the fiddle rails in the metal cabinets when I tell them about the quality and the amount of food prepared for the sailors. We talk about scratch cooking, holiday menus, and Saturday steak nights. At that point, I like to ask who’s had a frozen microwave meal and every hand goes up. Now they’re ready for a story they have the life experience to understand. I point to the freezers installed by the owners in the 1970s. I explain how even before most families had microwaves in their homes, the same companies whose names we recognize on microwave meals today were making large frozen meals for cooking in ovens. I tell them how the owners wanted to save money by having less “home-cooked” food. When I get to, “What do you think the sailors thought of that?,” their reactions are similar to the idea of hot bunking. “You’re right,” I say, and tell them that the company went back to the old meals by the end of the season because the crew were threatening to go elsewhere next season. The galley staff’s cabins are of particular interest to them when they find out that families used to live in those spaces when a parent took the winter layup ship keeper position. There are many spots throughout the boat to make these connections, and enough suitable ones to […]